L.A.: A Queer History (Film Bliss Studios, L.A.: A Queer History, PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, July 31) my husband Charles and I watched “Protests and Parades,” the second half of the two-part 2021 PBS program L.A.: A Queer History. Charles and I had already seen the first half, “Culture and Criminalization,” over the week we were staying with his mother Edi in Martinez, California. She’d recorded it on her digital video recorder (a piece of technology I’ve avoided because it would only add to our already astronomical cable bill) and we watched the first half there, then streamed the second half on our own computer last night. L.A.: A Queer History was at least an indirect challenge to what’s become the “print the legend” version of the history of U.S. Queer activism, which that it all began overnight when New York police raided an unlicensed dive bar called the Stonewall Inn in June 1969 and, instead of meekly submitting to police abuse, fought back. Only this wasn’t the first time Queers had fought back against a police raid on a Gay bar; it had happened in Los Angeles at the Black Cat on Sunset Boulevard on New Year’s 1966/1967.

One of my pet peeves over the years has been the way in which New York City has arrogantly and entirely falsely proclaimed itself as the epicenter of the Queer rights movement, when as I once testily pointed out in a leaflet, virtually every milestone in American Queer history happened in California. California was the site of the first ongoing Gay rights organization, the Mattachine Society, founded by Harry Hay and four others (including Dale Jennings and future fashion designer Rudi Gernreich) in L.A. in 1950. California was the site of the first ongoing Lesblan organization as well: the Daughters of Bilitis, founded by Lesbian couple Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon in San Francisco in 1955. California was the founding ground for the first ongoing Gay publication, One (which won a key court case in 1954 against the U.S. Post Office, which had banned the publication as “obscene” because it presented Gay life and culture positively), and the first ongoing Lesbian publication, The Ladder. And something I hadn’t known about until I watched this program was that the use of the word “PRIDE” in connection with Queer activism in the U.S. was also from California. “PRIDE” was originally an acronym for “Personal Rights In Defense and Education,” a Queer resistance organization founded in L.A. in 1966, which came into its own as a support group for the Black Cat rioters when they were prosecuted by the police. Even before that, California could claim some other major “firsts” in the history of American Queer activism, including the first openly Queer candidate for elective office in U.S. history. His name was José Saria, and in 1963 he was a drag performer and MC at a Gay bar in San Francisco that, like its L.A. namesake, was called the Black Cat. When the Black Cat was targeted for police raids, Saria not only organized his patrons to fight back, he announced his candidacy for the Board of Supervisors (San Francisco’s equivalent to a city council) and somehow got enough people to sign his petition to be on the ballot, despite the fact that merely signing your name and address would get you targeted for enforcement and potential arrest by the police. Saria lost, but along the way he founded the Imperial Court (a sort of Gay equivalent of a charitable lodge) and made his mark on the history of Queer activism.

Indeed, I would argue that virtually all the most important historical milestones for Queer community activism in American history came from California. The only ones that didn’t were the very first Gay rights organization in U.S. history, the Society for Human Rights, founded in Chicago in 1924 by German immigrant Henry Gerber; Frank Kameny’s pickets against the federal government for anti-Queer discrimination starting in 1965 in Washington, D.C.; and the Stonewall riots themselves. San Francisco also saw the first pickets against a private employer for anti-Queer discrimination when my late friend and associate Leo Laurence and his friend (not his partner, though that was widely reported then) Gale Whittington, organized protests against the States Steamship Lines when they fired Whittington for appearing with Laurence in a photo illustrating an article about Gay militancy. The analysis of Gay history presented in L.A.: A Queer History, directed by Gregorio Davila, argues that a number of factors combined to make L.A. a Gay hotbed in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Among them were the prominence of the movie industry, which attracted many more or less openly Gay men including costume designers Gilbert Adrian and Orry-Kelly; and the U.S. involvement in World War II, which pulled a lot of young Gay men out of their repressive small towns and plunged them into a big city where there were plenty of available partners for Gay sex. Starting in 1943, the U.S. government, deciding that the war was pretty much won, gradually became less tolerant of Gays in the ranks, and after the war there was a full-blown campaign of repression against not only “Communists” (defined as anyone markedly Left in their politics, whether they had any use for the Communists’ insane levels of discipline or not) but Queers. Articles about the “Lavender Menace” began to appear, and thousands of Gay men were dishonorably discharged from the military and thereby given “bad papers” that made it harder for them to find civilian jobs as well.

By far the most important and influential Gay leader that emerged from this period was Harry Hay, one of my personal heroes (when I launched my own Queer paper, Zenger’s Newsmagazine, in 1994 Harry Hay was my first cover boy). He was the son of a mining engineer who’d spent a lot of his boyhood with his father in Chile, and in the late 1940’s he joined the Henry Wallace Presidential campaign (Wallace was an independent candidate who had been Franklin Roosevelt’s designated successor, but he turned against the Democratic Party over the Cold War and ran for President, ostensibly as the candidate of the Progressive Party but with a lot of support from the Communists). Hay organized a support committee called “Bachelors for Wallace” and ultimately got kicked out of the Communist Party for being Gay. (At the time the Communists regarded homosexuality as a form of “bourgeois social decadence” that would automatically disappear when the Communists won the world revolution.) In 1950 Hay and four others organized the Mattachine Society, named after a sect of medieval court jesters whom Hay believed had been Gay, only three years later he was thrown out of the group by more conservative members because, in order to protect the group against law-enforcement infiltration, he’d adopted the secretive organizational structure of the Communist Party. For the rest of his life – he lived until 2002 – Hay hung around on the outskirts of the Queer movement, at times resurfacing, as he did in the late 1980’s (when I first met him). Reacting to the way Pride organizations were barring the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) from marching in Pride parades, Hay started showing up at parades carrying triangle-shaped signs saying, “I march with NAMBLA.”

If San Francisco Gay politician and martyr Harvey Milk was the Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Queer movement, Hay was its Frederick Douglass. It was Hay who first conceived of the idea of Gays and Lesbians as an oppressed minority, at a time when most Queer activists bought into the idea that being Queer was “a sickness” and tried to frame the movement as comparable to the one to counter discrimination against people with disabilities. It was also the early Mattachine Society which organized the first successful resistance to a police arrest of one of its founding members, Dale Jennings (extensively interviewed in this film), for “lewd conduct.” Hay and others were able to fundraise to hire him an attorney, who caught the arresting officer in a lie on the witness stand and led the judge to dismiss the case, calling it the worst-presented case on anything he’d ever heard. The second half of L.A.: A Queer History tells a more familiar part of the story, including an extensive set of interviews and profiles with Rev. Troy Perry. After he was excommunicated from the Baptist Church as a minister for being Gay, he decided to start his own, the Metropolitan Community Church, as an outreach for people who identified both as Christian and Gay and wanted a space to worship where they would not be shunned for being Queer. Rev. Perry was also instrumental in planning the first Christopher Street West parade – whose organizers named it after the Greenwich Village location of the Stonewall Inn and thus helped perpetuate the myth that the Queer movement had started in New York City – and making sure it was a parade rather than a protest march. He and the other organizers had the predictable trouble getting permits for the event after Ed Davis, then the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, denounced them and their plans for a parade before the L.A. City Council. (Two decades later, as an elected official in California, Davis did an abrupt about-face on the issue and became one of the few Queer-friendly politicians in the Republican Party.)

The show also zips through controversies that emerged as the movement grew and matured in the 1970’s, including the insistence of women activists on being called “Lesbian” instead of “Gay” (which ignores the fact that a number of women at the time actually disliked the term “Lesbian” and preferred to be called “Gay women”); the racism that afflicted prime Gay bars and discos against people of color, including the requirement that Gay men who looked Black or Latino show two or three ID’s while white-presenting Gay men could get in with just one; and the galvanic shock of the advent of AIDS in 1981. Suddenly huge numbers of Gay and Bisexual men were coming down with unusual cancers and other diseases and rapidly dying from them. Rev. Perry recalled that the number of funerals he was officiating at swelled from one a week to one a day to tens a day, and the obituaries in Gay papers grew until they covered several pages in each issue. Ironically, one effect of AIDS on the Queer community was it broke down the institutionalized sexism that had hampered Lesbians within the movement; all of a sudden organizations began hiring women for key leadership positions because they were likely to be around quite a while longer than their male counterparts. L.A.: A Queer History ends with the formation of ACT UP (the “AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power”) in 1987 and the quickly dashed hopes of many Queer activists that the replacement of Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush with Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 would end federal hostility against Queers and promote an aggressive response to the AIDS epidemic. Instead, as more than one interviewee on this program pointed out, it was Clinton who signed the two most openly anti-Queer laws ever passed by Congress, the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” “compromise” restricting Queers in the military in 1993 and the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” of 1996 which defined marriage, for purposes of federal law, as only between one man and one woman. Though there’s a certain “print the legend” aspect to L.A.: A Queer History (including its use of the terms “HIV” and “AIDS” interchangeably), for the most part it’s not only a necessary correction to the “Stonewall” myth that the Queer movement started in New York City in 1969 but a compelling history in its own right.